Thomas Erdbrink

Newsha Tavakolian

Thomas Erdbrink, one of the few Western reporters accredited for U.S. media in the Islamic Republic of Iran, joined The Times in 2012 as Tehran bureau chief.

He has carefully tracked Iran’s controversial nuclear program and the impact of international sanctions. His articles have offered insight into the rise of Iran’s influential middle classes and the increasing infighting of the ruling elite, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s struggle for political survival.

He has covered the changing lives of single women, a competition for Koran singers, the depression that comes with continuous air pollution, forbidden satellite channels and a small group of private investors renovating old houses in the city of Kashan.

He has also reported on the wars in Iraq and Lebanon, and helped cover the Arab Spring. In 2011, he was among the reporting vanguard in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, who witnessed rebel forces overrunning Dar al-Azizi, Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s stronghold.

He began reporting on Iran in 1999 and has been based in Tehran since 2002, when he worked for NRC Handelsblad of the Netherlands. He became Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post in 2008 and covered the unprecedented anti-government protests that engulfed Tehran and other cities after the presidential election of 2009. He managed to remain in Iran, working under complicated conditions, at a time when other media pulled out and some journalists were forced to leave.

In an article on rising inequality in Iran, he highlighted the sale of edible gold topped ice creams sold in an upmarket restaurant connected to Tehran’s municipality, which led to a fatwa on the dessert by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said it was decadent. His article on Iranian acid victim Ameneh Bahrami, who Iran’s judiciary offered to blind her attacker as a reprisal, led to worldwide debate over the sentence.

Fluent in Dutch, English, Persian and German, he regularly appears on European television, and in the United States has contributed to several MSNBC, NPR and PRI.

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